Rain Man
03-16-2006, 02:55 PM
Okay. First the boulders didn't get delivered, because they supposedly got delivered to the wrong place.
Then, they figured out that they had never delivered them, but they had instead just lost the order.
Then, they figured out that they no longer had the boulders marked, and asked us to once again make the one-hour round trip to the rock yard to identify them.
We got up at 5:00 this morning to get there right when they opened, because I've got work to do. The whole way out, I'm talking up these boulders to my wife, because I know my wife, and I don't want her wandering around and picking out new boulders that she likes better, so I even told her that I've named each of the boulders to make sure that nothing happens.
We wander out to the boulders, and of course three of the four are still marked, but no one has ever bothered to look. The fourth one was never marked, because when I picked it out, the idiot that I was talking to said that it was unique enough that he would remember it, and that he would be moving all of them to the pick up zone. Of course, he never moved any of them, which explains the whole problem in the first place. With his little pinhead of a brain, he forgot everything about the order and the fact that I even existed.
So...I stand around watching them pull the boulders out to make sure they get the right ones, and at one point sink into mud halfway up to the tops of my shoes. 99 percent of the ground is dry, but there's one stretch that looked dry, but was instead some type of quicksand mud or something, so I had that to contend with all the while looking at my watch.
They get the boulders all moved and say that they'll deliver them, and they weigh them as they're putting them on the truck. (It's one of those truck scales, so I don't know the weight.) I go into the office to settle up. I then ask how much each of the boulders weigh, just to be safe.
Flashback, and background note: the boulders have to be small enough to fit through a normal size door, because my yard is completely enclosed. The only way to get the boulders into the yard is to carry them or cart them through my garage and then out the back door of the garage. The landscapers said that they could carry a 500 to 700 pound rock through, as long as it had one dimension that was smaller than 30 inches.
I spent two freaking hours picking out these boulders, not even counting the drive out there and back. I checked texture, I checked shape, I checked form and function. I sat on them to see if they would be a good sitting rock. I ran my hand across them to see if they would be a good cat-lounging rock. I made sure that the four of them had a positive feng shui, and that, in combination, they offered a variety of looks, shapes, and textures that brought tranquility and a visual cornucopia to the viewer.
Okay, so anyway, the idiot at the rock yard had walked out with me, and he said that there was really no need to weigh the rocks immediately, because he could make a really good estimate of their weights based on his experience. He checked out each boulder, and came up with estimates of 400, 500, 500, and 700 pounds.
Return to current scene.
The dude looks at the invoice, and says, "They weigh in at 770, 960, 960, and 1,400 pounds."
The pinhead idiot was off by 100 percent in his estimates.
Okay, so my wife has gone to the car, so I go back and tell her, and she freaks out. Absolutely freaks out. "We have to get all new ones," she's saying. "All new."
At this point, I'm incredibly ticked off. We've got about five minutes before I HAVE to get back to work, so I lobby for just putting back the big one (they're already on the delivery truck at this point), and seeing if the contractor can move the other three on site. It's a 20-foot move, and mankind has invented all kinds of tools such as levers and refrigerator dollies, and it shouldn't be a problem. My wife continues to freak out, so I go down to two rocks.
We go back, and I tell them (implicitly) that their estimator is an idiot, and that the guy who runs the loader is also an idiot because he told us that we could have gone even bigger. We have them put back two of the boulders, and go wandering into the quicksand to find two more, which makes me want to scream because instead of four beautiful boulders, we're now rushing around to pick out some things that are really nothing more than big rocks. Stupid rocks, not boulders. Rocks. I'm so freaking mad.
And my wife is continuing to freak out, so she calls the contractor, and instead of being a man, instead of being a problem solver, the contractor is some sort of little girlie wimp and so he tells her that they can't take any of the three bigger rocks, and now my wife is all completely freaked out, and so she tells them to take all three of the bigger boulders off the truck, and she's pointing me towards rock chips that I can throw across a lake, and I'm really getting ticked off at having to waste my time dealing with idiot rockyard people and pussy willow contractors, and overreactive wives when I had the problem all solved weeks ago. And why can't the stupid contractor use a cart? Cavemen can use carts, and he's telling my wife that they're going to have to carry these rocks around. Moron. I think he's just lazy.
So we run around and pick out these three rock chips that, based on proportions, appear to be about four pounds each (or maybe 400, but they seem like rock chips in comparison), and I'm getting more and more mad by the minute, because these rocks are like Danny White and Neal Anderson in that no matter how nice they are, I'm always going to walk out my back door and see them and remember Roger Staubach and Walter Payton, and then I'll get mad and hate the new rocks, and then I'll feel guilty because I'll have negative reactions to these rocks that I'm sure are otherwise fine rocks except in comparison to Roger the Dodger and Sweetness, and the whole situation has gone from very positive with me having my boulders to very, very negative with me having just a bunch of rocks that I don't really know.
So we get these new rocks, whoever the hell they are, and the only remaining original rock is the 770-pound one, which I almost didn't buy two weeks ago because I thought it was too small, and now it's twice the size of the other pebbles that my wife has picked out with no sense of art or taste at all. They're just a bunch of rocks, and now I've only got one left that I know.
So I'm all mad, and I go in and settle up with the imbeciles at the rock yard, and I make a stop at the men's room before I get back to the car, and I can't find my wife because she's not at the car, and I finally find her back at the place with the rocks and I'm way late for work. We drive in to work and I'm all mad, and I drop my wife off to arrange delivery of the pebbles.
A couple of hours go by, and I'm still mad, and she comes in to work. I ask her if the rock chips got delivered, and she says, yes, and then she says, I need to tell you something. Okay, that's not good. I look at her, and she says she thought that the 770-pound rock was still too big, so when I went to the men's room she did her patented, Olympic-caliber knee-jerk reaction and ran back and told them to take off the only remaining boulder that I had picked out and she picked out some other random pebble that she liked. We drove in the car for 30 minutes back from that place, and she didn't tell me the whole time that she had freaking stabbed me in the back on that.
So now I'm just ready to chuck the whole project out into the street. Every time I go into that back yard and see Neal Anderson and Danny White and now some rock that I've never even seen before in my life, I'm going to be mad.
I might as well move. Goddammit.
Then, they figured out that they had never delivered them, but they had instead just lost the order.
Then, they figured out that they no longer had the boulders marked, and asked us to once again make the one-hour round trip to the rock yard to identify them.
We got up at 5:00 this morning to get there right when they opened, because I've got work to do. The whole way out, I'm talking up these boulders to my wife, because I know my wife, and I don't want her wandering around and picking out new boulders that she likes better, so I even told her that I've named each of the boulders to make sure that nothing happens.
We wander out to the boulders, and of course three of the four are still marked, but no one has ever bothered to look. The fourth one was never marked, because when I picked it out, the idiot that I was talking to said that it was unique enough that he would remember it, and that he would be moving all of them to the pick up zone. Of course, he never moved any of them, which explains the whole problem in the first place. With his little pinhead of a brain, he forgot everything about the order and the fact that I even existed.
So...I stand around watching them pull the boulders out to make sure they get the right ones, and at one point sink into mud halfway up to the tops of my shoes. 99 percent of the ground is dry, but there's one stretch that looked dry, but was instead some type of quicksand mud or something, so I had that to contend with all the while looking at my watch.
They get the boulders all moved and say that they'll deliver them, and they weigh them as they're putting them on the truck. (It's one of those truck scales, so I don't know the weight.) I go into the office to settle up. I then ask how much each of the boulders weigh, just to be safe.
Flashback, and background note: the boulders have to be small enough to fit through a normal size door, because my yard is completely enclosed. The only way to get the boulders into the yard is to carry them or cart them through my garage and then out the back door of the garage. The landscapers said that they could carry a 500 to 700 pound rock through, as long as it had one dimension that was smaller than 30 inches.
I spent two freaking hours picking out these boulders, not even counting the drive out there and back. I checked texture, I checked shape, I checked form and function. I sat on them to see if they would be a good sitting rock. I ran my hand across them to see if they would be a good cat-lounging rock. I made sure that the four of them had a positive feng shui, and that, in combination, they offered a variety of looks, shapes, and textures that brought tranquility and a visual cornucopia to the viewer.
Okay, so anyway, the idiot at the rock yard had walked out with me, and he said that there was really no need to weigh the rocks immediately, because he could make a really good estimate of their weights based on his experience. He checked out each boulder, and came up with estimates of 400, 500, 500, and 700 pounds.
Return to current scene.
The dude looks at the invoice, and says, "They weigh in at 770, 960, 960, and 1,400 pounds."
The pinhead idiot was off by 100 percent in his estimates.
Okay, so my wife has gone to the car, so I go back and tell her, and she freaks out. Absolutely freaks out. "We have to get all new ones," she's saying. "All new."
At this point, I'm incredibly ticked off. We've got about five minutes before I HAVE to get back to work, so I lobby for just putting back the big one (they're already on the delivery truck at this point), and seeing if the contractor can move the other three on site. It's a 20-foot move, and mankind has invented all kinds of tools such as levers and refrigerator dollies, and it shouldn't be a problem. My wife continues to freak out, so I go down to two rocks.
We go back, and I tell them (implicitly) that their estimator is an idiot, and that the guy who runs the loader is also an idiot because he told us that we could have gone even bigger. We have them put back two of the boulders, and go wandering into the quicksand to find two more, which makes me want to scream because instead of four beautiful boulders, we're now rushing around to pick out some things that are really nothing more than big rocks. Stupid rocks, not boulders. Rocks. I'm so freaking mad.
And my wife is continuing to freak out, so she calls the contractor, and instead of being a man, instead of being a problem solver, the contractor is some sort of little girlie wimp and so he tells her that they can't take any of the three bigger rocks, and now my wife is all completely freaked out, and so she tells them to take all three of the bigger boulders off the truck, and she's pointing me towards rock chips that I can throw across a lake, and I'm really getting ticked off at having to waste my time dealing with idiot rockyard people and pussy willow contractors, and overreactive wives when I had the problem all solved weeks ago. And why can't the stupid contractor use a cart? Cavemen can use carts, and he's telling my wife that they're going to have to carry these rocks around. Moron. I think he's just lazy.
So we run around and pick out these three rock chips that, based on proportions, appear to be about four pounds each (or maybe 400, but they seem like rock chips in comparison), and I'm getting more and more mad by the minute, because these rocks are like Danny White and Neal Anderson in that no matter how nice they are, I'm always going to walk out my back door and see them and remember Roger Staubach and Walter Payton, and then I'll get mad and hate the new rocks, and then I'll feel guilty because I'll have negative reactions to these rocks that I'm sure are otherwise fine rocks except in comparison to Roger the Dodger and Sweetness, and the whole situation has gone from very positive with me having my boulders to very, very negative with me having just a bunch of rocks that I don't really know.
So we get these new rocks, whoever the hell they are, and the only remaining original rock is the 770-pound one, which I almost didn't buy two weeks ago because I thought it was too small, and now it's twice the size of the other pebbles that my wife has picked out with no sense of art or taste at all. They're just a bunch of rocks, and now I've only got one left that I know.
So I'm all mad, and I go in and settle up with the imbeciles at the rock yard, and I make a stop at the men's room before I get back to the car, and I can't find my wife because she's not at the car, and I finally find her back at the place with the rocks and I'm way late for work. We drive in to work and I'm all mad, and I drop my wife off to arrange delivery of the pebbles.
A couple of hours go by, and I'm still mad, and she comes in to work. I ask her if the rock chips got delivered, and she says, yes, and then she says, I need to tell you something. Okay, that's not good. I look at her, and she says she thought that the 770-pound rock was still too big, so when I went to the men's room she did her patented, Olympic-caliber knee-jerk reaction and ran back and told them to take off the only remaining boulder that I had picked out and she picked out some other random pebble that she liked. We drove in the car for 30 minutes back from that place, and she didn't tell me the whole time that she had freaking stabbed me in the back on that.
So now I'm just ready to chuck the whole project out into the street. Every time I go into that back yard and see Neal Anderson and Danny White and now some rock that I've never even seen before in my life, I'm going to be mad.
I might as well move. Goddammit.